How to Make Fancy Filled Muffins in Ramekins!

We’ve baked sticky toffee pudding in these pretty little ramekins. Now we wanted to do the same thing with muffins.

We chose muffin mixes rather than cake mixes because wanted something denser, more like the sticky toffee pudding we had been using.

With the sticky toffee pudding, we used a pastry bag to inject toffee sauce right into the desserts. And we spilled a little to the outside. Finally, we topped the sticky toffee pudding with buttercream enriched with the toffee sauce.

The plan was to do the same thing with muffins! Bake them in ramekins and fill them with caramel sauce or a pastry filling, and frost them. We did do that. They looked like the ones to the right.

We made some with our Cinnamon Bun Brown Sugar Muffin Mix, filled them with apple pastry filling, and frosted them with a cream cheese frosting that we spiked with a touch of orange and tiny candied ginger pieces.

We served these in the store and folks loved them. “Tastes like a cinnamon bun in a cup!”

But we made some without the frosting, just the apple filling. I loved those. The muffins were loaded with cinnamon chips so they were sweet and the pastry filling was sweet. They didn’t need to be sweeter still with a frosting.

Here’s how to make them:

It took a couple trials to get the right amount of batter in ramekin. The mix makes 12 high-domed muffins but the ramekins are a larger diameter. You can see the high domes on the muffins in the ramekins. That takes eight. So, buy two sets of four so that you can bake them all in one batch and serve them to your guests in ramekins.

Follow the directions on the package.

Grease eight ramekins. Divide the batter between the eight ramekins.

Set a wire cooling rack on a large baking sheet. Set all eight ramekins on the rack.

Set the baking sheet with the rack and ramekins in the oven.

Bake the muffins for 20 minutes or until they start to brown.

After they have cooled enough to handle but still warm, cut a 1/4 to 3/8-inch corner off a package of apple pastry filling. Press the open corner into the muffin and squeeze. The muffin will start to swell as it fills. If you have kitchen scales, 1 1/4 ounces of filling is about right. You should use about a third of the package on your eight muffins.

As you withdraw the pastry pack, let a little of filling fill the hole and spread around the hole.

If you decide to make cream cheese frosting, the candied ginger pieces are a very nice touch. We chopped them slightly so that most of the pieces were less than 1/4-inch.

You’ll want to buy some extra Cinnamon Chip Brown Sugar Muffin Mixes. They are excellent. You will have enough apple filling for three batches. You can save the remaining filling in your refrigerator for up to six months.